Russians cast their ballots across the country’s 11 time zones yesterday, the start of a three-day election that is almost certain to hand President Vladimir Putin six more years at the helm of the world’s biggest nuclear power.
Amid the Ukraine war, the deadliest conflict in Europe since World War II, the 71-year-old Kremlin chief dominates Russia’s political landscape and none of the other three candidates on the ballot paper presents any credible challenge.
The Kremlin says Putin, in power as president or prime minister since the last day of 1999, will win as he commands broad support for rescuing Russia from post-Soviet chaos and standing up to what it says is an arrogant, hostile West.
Photo: AP
From Chukotka on the Pacific 6,300km away from Moscow to the Kaliningrad exclave on the Baltic Sea bordering Poland, some of Russia’s more than 190 ethnic groups turned out to vote in national costume.
In Yakutsk, an eastern Siberian city where the temperature was minus-18oC, the descendant of a Yukaghir shaman asked spirits to bring good luck to the winner of the election during a ceremony at one polling station.
In other Russian cities, one woman dressed up as Barbie and another came to a polling station dressed in a tiger outfit.
Photo: AFP
However, the shadow of the Ukraine war hangs over the election: Russia has more than 1 million men in arms and several hundred thousand fighting a grinding artillery and drone war along the 1,000km front line in Ukraine.
More than 114 million Russians are eligible to vote, including in what Moscow calls its “new territories” — four regions of Ukraine that its forces only partly control, but which it has claimed as part of Russia. Ukraine says the staging of elections there is illegal and void.
Putin is running against Communist Nikolai Kharitonov, Leonid Slutsky, leader of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party and Vladislav Davankov of the New People party. Two anti-war candidates, Boris Nadezhdin and Yekaterina Duntsova, were barred from running by the electoral commission, which cited irregularities in their paperwork.
The widow of leading opposition politician Alexei Navalny and supporters have called on people across Russia to protest by turning out to vote all at the same time at noon tomorrow in each of the country’s 11 time zones.
They have presented the “Noon Against Putin” action as a way for people to express opposition without the risk of arrest, as they will be queuing up to vote legally. The Kremlin has warned people against taking part in unauthorized gatherings.
Under constitutional changes that voters approved in 2020, Putin is eligible to run for yet another term in 2030, potentially extending his rule to 2036.
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